Under the Lash by Carolyn Faulkner Read Free Book Online

managed to lever herself up and onto her feet, and was in the process of trying to hop across the floor while he’d had his back turned to her.
    She had only gotten about two hops away from the bed, but he was still amazed at her determination to be rid of him. Apparently she had no idea of what awaited her if she made it outside that door, either, so he scooped her up into his arms long enough to deposit her back on the bed. Seeing that she was lying on arms that were tied behind her back, and knowing from personal experience just how uncomfortable that position could be, he rolled her away from him and loosed her arms, intending to rearrange them so that they were – conveniently – bound to the bedposts, instead, which he determined would be at least somewhat more comfortable, despite the fact that that would force her to put her backside in more contact with the bedclothes, but he hoped that uncomfortable reminder might help her keep her station in mind for their next encounter. He couldn’t be spending all of his time looking after her. He had a ship to run.
    But he had no sooner freed one of her hands when she used it to clout him surprisingly hard on the ear as she quickly released her other one and began to roll and scrunch herself towards the end of the bed.
    “Bloody hell, get back here!” Trying to grab her and hold his ear wasn’t working, so the ear was quickly forsaken. With her hands free, she was even more of a termagant, a veritable whirling dervish of frustrated femininity. He ended up hauling her back to the general area he wanted her in on the bed then just lying over her midsection and letting her beat futilely away on his broad back while he lashed first one wrist to a post and then, after getting up to reposition himself, giving the other the same treatment.
    Breathing heavily, he ran a hand through his hair, listening to what he was sure was a long list of curses she was busily heaping upon his head. “I was going to put your bloomers back on for you, but I think that that tantrum lost you the privilege entirely. You’ll be lucky if I allow you to wear them ever again, missy.”
    In a fit of pique, he decided to rearrange her legs in a manner that was sure to cause her the most embarrassment, lacing them to holes he’d placed himself in the frame of the bed, arranging her so that her skirts lay back over her stomach and breasts, pretty much obscuring her view of anything but them, with her legs bent and kept in place well back and up. She looked as if she was ready to give birth, but her flat tummy belied that notion entirely.
    Instead she was fit for what he intended to do to her next as he found himself entirely unable to keep from touching the downy triangle between her legs. She flinched away from him as best she could, but it was a token measure since she couldn’t go anywhere.
    As he fondled her casually, listening to her piteous weeping, he said harshly, “Before you’re in such an all fired hurry to get out of my cabin, you might well think about the consequences. There are nigh on to fifty men on the other side of that door, and none of them – well, with one possible exception – would treat you even half as well as I have. They’d already have raped you every way they could think of, and then they would have passed you off to their friends – at a price, of course, that you would never see any of.
    “That is to say nothing of the fact that I now owe you not only your regularly allotted daily spankings, but also a thorough disciplinary session just based on the fact that you boxed my ear. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that you were so quick to scurry off to warn the townspeople of our presence in that safe little harbor behind the Duque’s mansion. There’s still that to deal with, too, missy. Don’t be thinking that I’ll just forget all about that.
    “Especially since you haven’t given me any reason to in the least,” he pronounced, very carefully